RE: Damned Catholics
September 1, 2023 at 6:09 am
(This post was last modified: September 1, 2023 at 6:11 am by Fake Messiah.)
I was sent to a Magdalene Laundry when I was 12 – the abuse I suffered there was pure evil
Maureen Sullivan spent almost five years of her childhood in the notorious Irish institution. Now, at 71, she is speaking out, despite some defenders of the Catholic Church still wanting her to stay silent.
A priest was called, mystery conversations took place, and Sullivan was instead told she was going to “a lovely new school” in New Ross, Wexford, 34 miles away from home in Carlow, a school where she’d also be living. Her mother listened to the nuns and the local priest, and nervously took their instruction. Off Sullivan went.
That “lovely new school” turned out to be a Magdalene Laundry, also known as a Magdalene Asylum, an Irish institution run by the Catholic Church from 1922 to 1996, to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined to these notorious homes, a dark past that Ireland is still reckoning with.
From that day in 1965 onwards, Sullivan, now 71, one of the youngest known survivors of a laundry, never saw her school books again. She says she was forced to clean clothes and scrub floors night and day, seven days a week for no pay, beaten, and prevented from speaking. Her hair was chopped off and she was given a new name, Frances.
She didn’t know this as a child, but now believes that names were changed so that the survivors would “never know each other on the outside, never find each other, so we’d have to stay silent, and the rot would be covered up.”
Sullivan also didn’t know at the age of 12, that other women around her were victims of rape and sexual assault – like her. There were also women deemed too flirtatious or promiscuous, some women with disabilities or special needs, many women deemed at odds with societal expectations.
These homes were similar institutions to the “mother-and-baby” homes for women who had babies out of wedlock, and another way that the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant. By the 50s, one per cent of Ireland’s population was contained in institutions of coercive confinement.
“The nuns watched me work to the bone,” Sullivan tells i, her gentle tone simmering with a quiet fury. “I was doing hard penance as if I was a sinner. I was ostracised in every way, punished for the crime my stepfather committed against me. He was left at home, in the family and in society still, to go on and abuse others. It was thought that abuse like I’d experienced should be covered up, hidden away.
“I was given no books, pens, or paper. I spent those years without having a conversation. I saw my mother a handful of times over the next five years,” she recalls. Sullivan and the fellow girls and women in the laundries were referred to as “penitents”: a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins.
“It was horrendous and cruel that I went from being abused, to more abuse,” says Sullivan. “What they did to me is pure evil. I can’t find any other word for it.”
“The laundry wasn’t a refuge, it was a prison, and we were treated as slaves. Everything we did was for the church’s profit, but we got nothing,” she says. “The laundry would pile in every day from hotels, restaurants and the armies, plus churches, and the priests. I cleaned, washed and ironed it all from morning until night.”
She remembers being slapped around the face when she dropped a bucket of water by accident, being dug in the ribs with a crucifix if she so much as looked at anyone else, and often went without being given water, so would have to drink what she could from the sink in the toilets.
“For a while I kept asking the nuns when I’d be going to school, whether I could have the pencil case back that my mother had given me, where the classroom was. I didn’t understand where I was, or why I was there. Nobody ever explained it to me.” After two years, Sullivan was, as she puts it, “trafficked” to another laundry – this time, an institution for blind women, where she was allowed to speak to the women, but was still working seven days a week without pay.
In 1993, Sullivan – who is still afraid of the dark and has lamps on in every corner of her home – saw the breaking news that 155 unmarked graves had been uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. “It gave me strength,” she says. She joined a laundry survivor group. “We began asking a lot of questions, and started talking openly, which of course the Church denied,” she says.
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/sent...il-2579512
Maureen Sullivan spent almost five years of her childhood in the notorious Irish institution. Now, at 71, she is speaking out, despite some defenders of the Catholic Church still wanting her to stay silent.
A priest was called, mystery conversations took place, and Sullivan was instead told she was going to “a lovely new school” in New Ross, Wexford, 34 miles away from home in Carlow, a school where she’d also be living. Her mother listened to the nuns and the local priest, and nervously took their instruction. Off Sullivan went.
That “lovely new school” turned out to be a Magdalene Laundry, also known as a Magdalene Asylum, an Irish institution run by the Catholic Church from 1922 to 1996, to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined to these notorious homes, a dark past that Ireland is still reckoning with.
From that day in 1965 onwards, Sullivan, now 71, one of the youngest known survivors of a laundry, never saw her school books again. She says she was forced to clean clothes and scrub floors night and day, seven days a week for no pay, beaten, and prevented from speaking. Her hair was chopped off and she was given a new name, Frances.
She didn’t know this as a child, but now believes that names were changed so that the survivors would “never know each other on the outside, never find each other, so we’d have to stay silent, and the rot would be covered up.”
Sullivan also didn’t know at the age of 12, that other women around her were victims of rape and sexual assault – like her. There were also women deemed too flirtatious or promiscuous, some women with disabilities or special needs, many women deemed at odds with societal expectations.
These homes were similar institutions to the “mother-and-baby” homes for women who had babies out of wedlock, and another way that the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant. By the 50s, one per cent of Ireland’s population was contained in institutions of coercive confinement.
“The nuns watched me work to the bone,” Sullivan tells i, her gentle tone simmering with a quiet fury. “I was doing hard penance as if I was a sinner. I was ostracised in every way, punished for the crime my stepfather committed against me. He was left at home, in the family and in society still, to go on and abuse others. It was thought that abuse like I’d experienced should be covered up, hidden away.
“I was given no books, pens, or paper. I spent those years without having a conversation. I saw my mother a handful of times over the next five years,” she recalls. Sullivan and the fellow girls and women in the laundries were referred to as “penitents”: a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins.
“It was horrendous and cruel that I went from being abused, to more abuse,” says Sullivan. “What they did to me is pure evil. I can’t find any other word for it.”
“The laundry wasn’t a refuge, it was a prison, and we were treated as slaves. Everything we did was for the church’s profit, but we got nothing,” she says. “The laundry would pile in every day from hotels, restaurants and the armies, plus churches, and the priests. I cleaned, washed and ironed it all from morning until night.”
She remembers being slapped around the face when she dropped a bucket of water by accident, being dug in the ribs with a crucifix if she so much as looked at anyone else, and often went without being given water, so would have to drink what she could from the sink in the toilets.
“For a while I kept asking the nuns when I’d be going to school, whether I could have the pencil case back that my mother had given me, where the classroom was. I didn’t understand where I was, or why I was there. Nobody ever explained it to me.” After two years, Sullivan was, as she puts it, “trafficked” to another laundry – this time, an institution for blind women, where she was allowed to speak to the women, but was still working seven days a week without pay.
In 1993, Sullivan – who is still afraid of the dark and has lamps on in every corner of her home – saw the breaking news that 155 unmarked graves had been uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. “It gave me strength,” she says. She joined a laundry survivor group. “We began asking a lot of questions, and started talking openly, which of course the Church denied,” she says.
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/sent...il-2579512
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"